After all the initial madness, I have elected to trudge along and just post content and hyperlink to points of interest. Maybe an image, but ultimately trying to post content and edit and hyperlink whilst posting causes, what I feel to be a very horrifying end product. I see my initial posts as somewhat manic and kind of scared myself that I posted things so overwhelming. Rest assured, I do intend to drown out the rabble with casual discussion of roleplaying, magic, magic in roleplaying, and likely other absurd things.
And but to get away from talking about myself.... I wanted to let you know I was building a game.
Yes- I know- just what the market needed, another ham-handed heartbreaker trying to make it in the world. Me, working in the nights and weekends to try to develop a perfect vision of 'Big F' Fantasy so that way you can purchase it and tuck it away in a closet or box to be disregarded though the ages. [Author's note: ⸮]
There are in fact a billion reasons I can think of not to try to develop a game. Zak S has a pretty great argument about why one should sublimate a desire to develop a whole system and instead re-channel those desires into the creation of setting content, adventure fuel, items, enemies, artifacts and dungeon fuel, which shall be defined here as 'Game Food' [I'll go into my dislike of the term "fluff" another time]. I link to it not as an aside: I command you to read it so that way you have that concept framing your worldview. It is just a great way to "get at" this.
But just as we need food, we need means to cook it and that is all systems are: They allow us to take ingredients and turn at table into something that nourishes us. Not all ingredients are good to cook by certain means. I have not yet tried to toast watermelon (though I now want to try to) but just as well you take frozen raw stake and just expect chuck that down your gullet (and I don't mean blue rare neither).
Now all the absurd permutations of my cooking analogy aside, that gets us two a few basic facts:
1. You only become a better chef by cooking
2. People's taste will always vary.
3. It is very different to try a different way to cook something and try and invent a new way to cook something.
But let me be clear- every new idea doesn't require a brand new game. You get an idea, you try to run it in your default/group's favorite/group familiar system; if that fails, you try and hack said system to work for your ideas; if that fails, you try and find a system you can run it in or see if someone has played that idea before. Building your own system, other then for learning about game design for it's own sake, can only ever be a marriage of necessity where every means and tool in your GM toolbench has failed you and now you gotta go into the garage and actually build something. And unless you are struck by the lighting of divine providence/Robert Johnson an RPG out of a devil (cause Shax be tabletop as FUCK), you have elected to take on a exercise I have found to be akin to trying to move from point A to point B by finding a bearing and then building a labyrinth in your path to get there.
So I think it is more than alright to make your own game- everyone should try it, I think. But always remember- millions before you have tried. Many have not published- those were the lucky ones. Others published and allowed the community to generate the term "Heartbreaker" off of them. Be mindful of them- take them to heart (no pun intended) , understand why that happens, and if you like your game enough to keep going, and you EDIT AND PLAYTEST YOUR GAME. But just as one should not exactly go into the RPG world looking for plunder and glory [See: Unrealistic Expectations], nobody gets anywhere or does anything by thinking they are going to fail.
So for now, It is just good to see you again, and hopefully we can talk about some fun things around here.
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